


Symbiosis

by Quanna



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Other, Telepathy, Time Lord Stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 14:07:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5629234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quanna/pseuds/Quanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They need Contact, so she sings until she drowns out the silence stretching all around them.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p> In absence of a hivemind, this is all the Tardis can give them. Or, the Doctor is pretty upset after meeting the Master again, and the Tardis tries her best to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Symbiosis

**Author's Note:**

> Basically I have quite a few thoughts about the Doctor being An Alien, and the Tardis, and how they interact, and then i found this thing lurking in my documents. It's more of a drabble than a finished thing but eh who cares.
> 
> Also gender-neutral pronouns for the Doctor in this one, fight me.

They haven’t heard their own voice in a week, haven’t opened their eyes in two. Their long fingers trail along her corridors, barely touching the outer shell of the walls. She guides them in an invisible embrace as they try to organise the mess in their head; murmurs until they retain only the barest awareness of their body.

They need Contact, so she sings until she drowns out the silence stretching all around them. Long-forgotten hymns of Home, or a song they have yet to hear but she’s known for centuries. The hymns make them sad and will make them happy and have made them set fire to the world so she sings and sings, until their thoughts flow a little freer. She dims her lights and floods her corridors with heat, until they bask in it, hearts settling in time with her engines, and the two of them drift together for as long as they need.

They long for the vortex so she takes them there, shows them the stars she loves so fondly. They write their names in the air like clockwork. She sings of the forgotten and the lost and their breath hitches in their throat because of Them, the one that turned her systems against her at the end of the universe. The wounds are bleeding in their mind: burned synapses and raw nerve endings, dormant parts now awake and screaming because they’re gone again and they lied, have always lied, will always lie. They caress her with their bruised hands, begs her for forgiveness for what they did to her. She blankets them in the passing of the planets around them and reminds them of the stardust in their Carer’s face, until the tears stop leaking from their eyes.

Their skin glows as she heals it, light dancing over their body as they cast off layer after layer, drinking in the heat. She wants to treasure them while they recharge, but they’re already shutting down, unravelling at the edges. There’s so much of them after all this time, all these lives, she wonders how they keep it all contained within their shell.

They fall away and she quiets to a whispered lamentation, waits without peaking ahead for fear of seeing only darkness. Hour-long seconds pass, one after the other, until she feels them whisper back at her very edge, threading their mind through hers and returning her embrace. She sings of friends and carers and that one big, sad word woven through them all.

Alive, they tell her, drowning her in it. She wraps it round them in return, floods their veins with it. It's as close to Contact as she can give them and they’re grateful: broken and starving but not hurting anymore.

They weave themself back into their shell and she dares not think of how empty it makes her feel. Every time they get remade she loses them, that second where their mind replaces itself and she is left with nothing but the screaming silence. She can see all of them that ever will be but chooses not to look; they amaze her simply by being exactly here and now.

They need to go to their Clara-Carer, the one with time lines coiled tightly around theirs. The humans before, She could barely sense them before they blinked out. Their Clara-Carer is silent in her mind like them, but she flickers so much more brightly against the dark of time.

Their healed fingers soothe her out of her thoughts and she brings up the lights a little; sending them hurtling towards Earth.


End file.
